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It’s easy to view modern footballers as soulless mercenaries, to assume they feel no emotion whatsoever for a club or the fans. But we don’t really know any and all footballers. What if they just crush a lot? What if they are merely Don Juans, men with feelings who just happen to fall head over heels for the newest club and immediately forget the prior one? That may cheapen their prior feelings, but it doesn’t deny they existed.

Fandom is such a fickle business. The EPL season rages on after a month of action, so we’ve read yet another glut of “Pick your team” stories and podcast anecdotes. Some say follow your heart. Others say pick a winner. Yet, of course, fans find ways to put other fans down. If you’re from the US or another non-England country, then that’s a knock against you. Why? Geography. If you’ve been a fan less than a decade, that’s another knock. Why? History.

Lots of big media outlets have written about the transatlantic pollination of the English language. Thanks to the pace, passion, and commercial power of the Premier League, the US and UK have gotten over that whole “tea party” stuff and the free flow of individuals and ideas has accelerated. In no particular order, I thank you, British Isles, for Monty Python, Fredorrarci, the Office, James Joyce, and tea (I am including former England colonies as well).

Bobby Kohn was a champion darts player. You wouldn’t know it, even if you asked him. The crowning achievement of his life was an Ivy League degree that collected dust in a box in his parent’s basement on Long Island. Since graduating from Brown, he’d couch-surfed and freelanced in Brooklyn and Manhattan. After several months, he landed some stable advertising gig, rented a brownstone he couldn’t afford with friends in Bed-Stuy, and his credit card debt tripled in the span of six months.

After the recent 6-0 loss to Chelsea, Arsenal fans feel even more stung by Mou’s earlier claims that Wenger was a “specialist at failure.” Luckily, Gunners fun and excellent blogger Miriti Murungi, of the soon to be reborn Nutmeg Radio, has provided a listicle of non-failure areas where Wenger also specializes and excels.

The Arsenal has played the Manchester United. The game hath ended. In a tense game with end-to-end action, United won 1-0 off a header from a corner kick. All sportswriters will boldly proclaim something about a title race and spin the same story: Arsenal has only succeeded because they have played lesser teams. Of course, consistently beating lesser teams is, like, the recipe for winning a league.

You follow the news. You know that somebody took a picture of Jack Wilshere holding a cigarette outside a nightclub. I won’t bore you with the trite “Athletes are role models/I like to watch cocky, irresponsible assholes” debate. We lampooned it before. Rather, another angle to the Wilshere story caught my eye.

In response to Wenger’s criticisms, Jack Wilshere’s representative claimed that he was holding the cigarette as part of a prank and did not in fact smoke. Presumably, his representative said this because Jack couldn’t say such bs with a straight-face during a presser. Aside from being a lie, this excuse tramples over the intellectual property of former US President Bill Clinton, who famously “put a joint to this lips but didn’t inhale.”

For the last nine years, I’ve admired Arsenal from afar for both aesthetic and analytic reasons. Aesthetically, they were the Platonic ideal of beauty in football. The defenders and goalkeeper passed, the midfielders played sideways passes, and the forwards couldn’t be bothered to press off the ball. They didn’t win a trophy and that was the point: this was a team beyond results. Silverware would only soil the ideal. You can only stand so much success before you start to feel dirty.

Analytically, each season they raised the same argument to explain a lack of titles: basically, financial prudence today, future success tomorrow. Any close student of politics will know how unsuccessful this argument normally is: you are better off supplying a dose of instant gratification to the masses if you want to stay in power (at least for the short-term). That’s why Arsenal’s argument, their recurrent story of an ant amassing food while grasshoppers squandered the summer away, impressed me. Are people really buying this, I thought?

Even smart Arsenal fans started to get fed up (especially after they unexpectedly sold Song). You can only promise the future so many times. I anticipated two hysterical (if cynical) ends to the Arsene era: the club fails to qualify for the Champions League and their financial house of cards falls to pieces, or Arsene coyly waits for the last year of his contract before demanding a transfer to Barcelona.

Yes, the EPL started a few weeks ago. However, you don’t really read “season previews” expecting a glimpse of the future. You read them for pure entertainment value. You are excited by the EPL, and just want a bunch of blocks of letters, sometimes forming words and even sentences, that mention EPL clubs and players. Admit it.

This joke will never ever get old. Links. Linx. Giggle. But seriously, the last week of EPL action and the looming World Cup qualifiers have led to some fearsome soccer linx (and some good soccer writing). Enjoy. Continue reading “Ferocious Soccer Linx” »